It’s taken me a while to start writing about this book but that’s not for want of material to write about. Quite the opposite. This book contains so much it’s a bit overwhelming. It may be my abject ignorance about the First World War that contributes to this feeling. The book ends with Hans Castrop’s participation in the war and much of the book could be an allegory for the circumstances surrounding it. The character of Settembrini, especially in his debates with Naptha, seems to comment on the European political climate quite extensively. The symbolic quality of Settembrini is explicitly mentioned in the book when Castorp says to him drunkenly at Mardi Gras, “You’re not just anybody, a face with a name, you’re a representative of something, Herr Settembrini, a representative here and now and at my side - that’s what you are!” (p391)
I definitely had the sense that I was missing quite a lot in this symbolic or allegorical sense. Without knowing how much I am missing, it also seemed to me that the book contained so much more than this. I should also mention that I resisted the urge to read secondary interpretations of the allegorical nature of the book so as to keep my own impressions and reactions as authentic as possible. I feel it would be very easy to read a coherent explanation of such a complex book and suddenly come to adopt these suggestions wholesale. Given how famous the book is, I’m sure such explanations are abundant.
The book starts off impressively, proceeding at an agreeable pace with intricate, but not verbose or boring, detail of description. The books ‘hero’, Castrop, journeys up to a mountain sanatorium in Switzerland where his cousin, Joachim, is attempting to recover from pneumonia before joining the army. Interwoven into the narrative of his journey and reunion with his cousin is Castrop’s brief, but illuminating, personal history, which is detailed but not lengthy. The intimacy between the two is well drawn and the ease with which they settle into renewing their acquaintance in the alps helped me settle into the lengthy book as a reader. This feeling of tranquility was soon disrupted by the atmosphere of the sanatorium, which is creepy and surreal.
Both the doctors at the sanatorium, Director Behrens and his assistant Krokowski, the psychoanalyst, have an unsettling quality. My suspicions were immediately raised, perhaps wrongly, by the fact that everyone seems to have to stay at there for an indefinite period of time. This could be explained by the difficult nature of the diseases being treated there but I felt there were some hints that there might be a more commercial motivation behind the director’s continual extensions of the patients’ sentences. Later on, it becomes clear that the patients may actually be the motivating force behind the extension of their stays but I’ll discuss that more when I write about Castorp’s character in more detail. Hans seems remarkably sanguine about the seeming deterioration in his own health soon after he arrives. He feels faint, coughs up blood and can barely complete a innocuous walk. Initially I had the idea that Hans was being drugged by the doctors, perhaps via the beer he asks for after his meal. His pumping heart, bloodshot eyes and flushed complexion could be put down to the altitude. However, his sleepiness and inability to remember details such as his own age, struck me as suspicious. He also seems remarkably relaxed about coughing up blood on the second day. I wondered if pneumonia was infectious, which it isn’t really I discovered!
Hans’ purchase of a thermometer from the nurse during her rounds and his commencement of taking his temperature four times a day and charting the results like the other patients is another odd development. Again, I initially saw this pointing towards a ploy by the sanatorium to keep him there; perhaps by giving him a faulty thermometer. Later on, I began to see it as more of an attempt to stay by Hans himself especially given that most of the time his temperature is barely above the normal range. This is even commented on in the book itself, where reference is made to Hans’, “chronically slightly raised temperature” (p460). Indeed, once Hans has been at the sanatorium for an extremely long time he no longer receives even the pretense of medical attention and the previous activities are referred to as ‘medical diversions’ (p840). The buying of blankets to use on his balcony and his adoption of the numerous ‘rest cures’ may be other signs that Hans is being sucked into this disconcerting world of the ill and contribute to the creepy, unnerving atmosphere.
Eventually, and somewhat inevitably I felt, Hans becomes a patient. Joachim and Settembrini, who have been sceptics about the fact that everyone has to stay so long, try to warn Hans off extending his stay. Indeed, Joachim argues with Hans that he recovered from illness ‘down below’ without any problems so should go back. Hans, who is quite biddable in other passages, surprisingly rejects both his friends and chooses to stay. I’m also surprised that he isn’t more suspicious that he’s not the only one that has come up healthy and then turned sick; the Mexican woman’s second son being the other. The feeling that the sanatorium is something of a quack institution returned when Joachim tells Behrens that he won’t stay any longer and will leave, having stayed 6-9 months already. Behrens reacts angrily and tells Hans that he is free to go too without even examining him. The whole incident is strange and is explained by the narrator, and Hans, as a fit of rage on Behrens’ part. This is could have been brought on by Joachim’s refusal to take his advice or perhaps for unrevealed private reasons. In either case, Joachim does indeed leave but Hans remains. As Hans’ stay becomes ever longer, his cousin James Tiepennel comes to ‘reclaim’ Hans to the ‘flat lands’. This visit is also highly unusual and suspicious. The encounter follows exactly the same path as Hans own arrival when he comes to visit Joachim down to minute details - the train, the blanket, the restaurant, the uneasy impression Hans makes, the inane laughter of the resident and debilitating fatigue of the visitor at supper, the chance meeting with Dr Krokowski and the identical diagnosis by Behrens at breakfast (even including the pulling down of one eye!) - it reminded me of the circular description of the seasons. But here the cycle is broken because cousin Tiepennel realises that the life of the sanatorium will take a hold of him and escapes without even saying goodbye to Hans. I felt, surely, Hans should be somewhat perturbed and, perhaps, should feel like he has been the subject of some kind of fraud when he sees that his healthy cousin is diagnosed exactly like he was when he arrived. However, for whatever reason, it seems Hans is too deeply inculcated in the society of the sanatorium and, perhaps more importantly, has acquired status and placed meaning in it, as he desired to do all along. At this stage, I had the strong impression that he had been brainwashed in one form or another; either by the doctors, the environment,his own psychology or a combination of all three.
The sanatorium is probably most disconcerting during the period of seances and supernatural occurrences that take place after the arrival of Elly. A great number of the patients are involved in these attempts to make contact with the world of the dead, which seems strange. The author seems critical of Dr Krokowski for superintending such efforts and this is in keeping with the wary comments he makes about his lectures and practice of psychoanalysis. Hans, however, does end up attending psychoanalysis in spite of his own reservations about it earlier in the book. The attempts to interact with the dead take on an even more sinister and significant character when Hans successfully summons Joachim back to the world of the living with the help of Elly and her interlocutor in the underworld. The whole atmosphere of the sanatorium, and seemingly the world, changes after it. Violence and discordance breaks out in the sanatorium, Naphta and Settembrini’s never-ending intellectual jousting descends into an actual duel and, eventually, war breaks out across the world. This struck me as strange because the author, or perhaps it is only the narrator, initially seems incredulous about these supernatural undertakings but they quickly become the turning point for a dramatic disintegration of civil relations both in the sanatorium and the wider world. It’s hard not to think that it represents some historical event given its central significance to the plot’s development at the specific level of the sanatorium and globally. The incident when Hans, Elly and the others summon Joachim back from the dead does lead to an interesting perspective about the desirability of dead people returning to the realm of the living, “Ultimately, to put it plainly, it does not exist, this desirability. It is a miscalculation; by the light of cold day, it is impossible as the thing itself, which would be immediately evident if nature rescinded that impossibility even once; and what we call mourning is perhaps not so much the pain of the impossibility of ever seeing the dead return to life, as the pain of not being able to wish it.” (p805). I’m not sure I wholly agree with this although in practice it is impossible to say!
The sanatorium was cast in its most favourable light, for me, directly after Hans’ experience in the snowstorm. The storm itself struck me as the lodestone of the whole book and lent what small amount of understanding I did manage to gather from the swirling mass of themes and impressions contained in the rest of the story. Before the storm, it seemed like Hans was wasting his life away in a quack institution but after the snowstorm it seems like everything has all been worthwhile, if it’s caused him to have such seemingly invaluable epiphany; adding meaning and understanding to his life where before there was none. Expanding on the idea of the story as an allegory for the world, or Europe, perhaps the sanatorium is supposed to be a neutral backdrop with both positive and negative elements. I would probably reject this interpretation. I see the sanatorium being portrayed as creepy, unnatural and suspicious for some of the reasons I have outlined above.
The character of Hans is the central protagonist and is often referred to as a ‘hero’ by the narrator. It’s possible that Hans represents humanity as a whole or the general concept of ‘man’ within the world if the book’s plot is indeed an allegory of the world before WW1. The most persuasive evidence I have for this is the following passage: “I shall now call by its name: life’s problem child, man himself, his true state and condition.” (p584-5)
Against the idea that the sanatorium conspires to keep patients there is the theory that Hans himself wants to be ill and extend his stay at the sanatorium indefinitely. When Hans is introduced and we learn about his career he is described as having a preference for doing nothing, something that is well catered for at the sanatorium. He also demonstrates a dislike for the manner and social conduct of his family and friends down in the flatlands. Discussing his continued stay with Settembrini, who is an early and continual critic of this practice, Hans says, “What were the terms you used - detached and….And energetic! Fine, but what does that really mean? That means hard, cold. And what does hard and cold mean? It means cruel. The air down there is cruel, ruthless. Lying here and watching from a distance, it almost makes me shudder.” (p235) Clearly, Hans has a dislike for society down below and wishes to establish a distance between it and himself. The sanatorium provides an ideal solution in this regard. A worried Settembrini replies - “I will not attempt to gloss over the the specific forms life’s natural cruelty takes in your society. Be that as it may - the charge of cruelty is a rather sentimental charge. You would hardly have been able to make it there among your own people, for fear of looking ridiculous even to yourself. You have rightly left the making of that charge to life’s shirkers. For you to make it now is proof of a certain alienation that I would not like to see take root. Because a man who gets used to making that charge can very easily be lost to life, to the form of life for which he was born. Do you know what that means, my good engineer: ‘to be lost to life’? I know, I do indeed. I see it here every day. Within six months at the least, every young person who comes up here (and they are almost all young) has nothing in his head but flirting and taking his temperature. And within a year at the most he will never be able to take hold of any other sort of life, but will find any other life ‘cruel’ - or better, flawed and ignorant.” (p235-6) This prediction, in the long term, proves to be wrong but it is accurate in the short term. Not much later, Hans writes to his family to extend his stay yet again, “He signed it. That was done. This third letter home was comprehensive, it did the job - not in terms of conceptions of time valid down below, but in terms of those prevailing up here. It established HC’s freedom. That was the word he used, not explicitly, not by forming they syllables in his mind, but as something he felt in its most comprehensive sense, in the sense in which he head learned to understand it during his stay here” (p267) Given Hans’ family history, including the death of both his parents at a young age and growing up as an adopted child in an upper class family with a distant father figure, I think it is reasonable that he might feel some confusion and even disenchantment with the world. This is shown by the quote above regarding the ‘cruelty’ of life in the flatlands. It may also provide the reason, or even the psychological necessity, for his escape and retreat to the mountain. The narrator appears to agree with this, “We have as much right as anyone to private thoughts about the story unfolding here, and we would like to suggest that Hans Castrop would not have stayed with the people up here even this long beyond his originally planned date of departure, if only some sort of satisfactory answer about the meaning and purpose of life had been supplied to his prosaic soul from out of the depths of time.” (p273)
Hans’ character undergoes a lot of change in the book. He begins as a bit of a windbag, prone to babbling on and cod philosophy. These tendencies are shown in full flow during one of his injections with Behrens (p417-19) but the narrator praises his skillful management of the conversation, which is surely mocking. He bangs on and bungles his attempts to be subtle in asking about the girl he fancies at the sanatorium, Clavdia Chauchat. In some ways, Hans is a small minded, impressionable pedant - he hates banging doors, his table mate for being stupid while being ill and prattles on to Behrens and his cousin occasionally. However at other points the author attributes quite profound insights about eternity, infinity and logic to him, “But does not the very positing of eternity and infinity imply the logical, mathematical negation of things limited and finite, their relative reduction to zero? Is a sequence of events possible in eternity, a juxtaposition of objects in infinity? How does our makeshift assumption of eternity and infinity square with concepts like distance, motion, change, or even the very existence of a finite body in space? Now there’s a real question for you!” (p409). He is also highly impressionable, tending to adopt the views of whomever he comes into contact with and seeing virtue in almost everything even if two of these things are contradictory. However, he never seems to wholly adopt the ideas that fall before him and remains broadly lethargic and suffers from ennui. After the snowstorm, Hans seems transformed.
During his time up the mountain, various modes of life are displayed to him via the characters of Joachim, Settembrini, Naphta, Clavdia and probably others too. These either make little effect on him or combine to create a part of, or prelude to, the grand epiphany he undergoes during his near death experience in the snowstorm. The wonderful character of Mynheer Peeperkorn also seems to contribute to his change in character but only appears after the central snowstorm event, so this may be more debateable. The character of Peeperkorn is mysterious and in some ways inscrutable to me but more on that later.
Hans has a strange reverence for, and relationship to, death. His early life is scarred by the loss of both parents and later his grandfather who has been in loco parentis. He seems to like the ceremony and gravity that surrounds death and revels in his ability to play the part of a mourner appropriately given the considerable practice he has acquired at a young age. His reverence also appears to extend to illness and he complains that one of the women at his table offends him because she is both very ill and very stupid. He seems to accord death and illness a kind of majestic, mythical status and even links it to the feeling of love when he’s professing his love to Clavdia, “[they’re both] carnal, and that is the source of their terror and great magic” (p407) This kind of fixation on death as something worthy and noble is well exemplified when he says, “But was it not true that there were people, certain individuals, whom one found it impossible to picture dead, precisely because they were so vulgar? That was to say: they seemed so fit for life, so good at it, that they would never die, as if they were unworthy of the consecration of death.” (p550). Settembrini warns him against this idolisation of death and illness but Hans ignores him, as he often does, despite referring to him as his guide and teacher. Hans starts to visit dying patients in their rooms and presents them with flowers he buys from a florist in the village. Even thought this struck me as pretty weird and morbid, the invalids themselves seem pleased by his visits and he continues and extends them as they’re clearly enjoyable for him too. I tend to agree with Settembrini that this behaviour is unhealthy and even Hans seems to concur with this after his epiphany in the snowstorm declaring, “Love stands opposed to death - it alone, and not reason, is stronger than death. Only love, and not reason, is stronger than death. Only love and not reason, yields to kind thoughts.” (p588).
Hans’ lengthy obsession and brief love affair with Clavdia Chauchat (hot cat?) is another important strand in the his character’s development. Hans’ interest begins with his objection to her door slamming when she enters the dining room but even at this stage his disapproval has the flavour of a schoolboy being mean to the girl he has a crush on. Hans, however, doesn’t even venture this far and restricts himself to more subtle forms of interaction; glances, stares and drawing curtains to stop the sun from bothering her. His, repressed, claustrophobic interest in, and subsequent games to encounter, Clavdia are well drawn and exactly like the sort of crushes one develops when in close, but not familiar, confinement with others. One aspect of this that seemed strange to me was Hans’ reluctance to discuss his feeling with his cousin. Joachim, too, has a crush at the sanatorium but it is far less significant to the plot of the book. However, I would normally expect two well acquainted people, constantly in each others presence day after day, to discuss their feelings. My conclusion is that this is either fantastically unrealistic or that upper class Germany at this time was incredibly repressed! The storyline begins passively and then falls out of focus for a while as Hans’ develops his interest in physiology and visiting terminally ill patients; during this phase he barely seems to think about Clavida. The love story explodes back into the foreground during the Mardi Gras celebrations when the usual formalities are abandoned and everyone gets drunk. Hans professes his love to Clavdia and attempts to woo her in a strangely anatomical way around p400 proving himself to be a good deal less repressed than I had taken him to be based on his interactions with his cousin.
Hans’ motivations regarding Clavdia were a source of confusion for me from very early on in the book. Does Hans want to stay in the mountains because he is in love with her or does he simply want to stay up the mountain in general and Clavdia is a part of this more general desire or an entertainment while he does so? In the earlier paragraphs about the suspicious environment of sanatorium I had thought that there’s quite a lot to suggest that Hans’ simply wants to stay up in the mountains and that Clavdia is either an excuse to do so or a divertissement while he does so. However, Hans’ dramatic reaction to a withering look from Clavdia around p278 seems to indicate that he does care about her a great deal and, both interestingly and confusingly, that his harsh treatment has improved his raised temperature and other symptoms: “Two terrible days of depression had a chilling, sobering, slackening effect on HC’s nature, which, to his bitter humiliation, manifested itself in a very low temperature, barely above normal, and he came to the cruel realisation that his worry and grief had accomplished nothing except to place an even greater distance between himself and Clavdia’s being and nature.” (p278). As the passage indicates, this improvement only serves to compound Hans’ misery as he feels further from Clavida, presumably because he thinks he will have to go back down to the flat lands if he is cured. However, during the chapter ‘An Outburst of Temper’, when Hans’ is dismissed as cured by Behrens after his cousin announces he is going to leave, it seems that Hans will stay regardless. Hans offers his own testimony on the problem of his motivations for staying up the mountain during his declaration of love to Clavdia at Mardi Gras saying, “‘The fever in my body and the pounding of my exhausted heart and the trembling in my hands, it is anything but an episode, for it is nothing but’ - and he bent his pale face deeper towards hers, his lips twitching - ‘nothing but my love for you, or better, the love that I acknowledged once I recognised you - and it is that love, obviously, that has lead me to this place.” (p406). To me, this is not especially credible, first, because Hans is trying his hardest to persuade Clavdia of the intensity of his feelings; making him an unreliable and biased witness. Secondly, the very symptoms he describes go into remission when he feels spurned by Clavdia, which would be the opposite of what I would expect from the traditional conception of a lovesick person. Thirdly, the book mentions Hans’ symptoms from the moment he arrives at the sanatorium when he hasn’t even seen Clavdia. In this way, Hans’ true motivations seem enigmatic but this is not really problematic as they may have the same character for Hans himself! An aspect of their interaction that is far less satisfactory is the incredibly high blown, philosophical conversation they have at Mardi Gras, which is pretty inconceivable for two drunk people in their mid twenties who barely share a common language. It also struck me as out of character for Hans but that, like his uncharacteristic boldness on that night, could be attributed to alcohol.
It occured to me that perhaps Hans’ idea that his symptoms are due to his love for Clavdia spring from his obsession with illness. In the paragraph on Hans’ preoccupation with death, I quote him as equating the two because of their ‘carnal’ nature. He also thinks that the evidence of a previous illness that Behren’s finds during the X-ray of his lungs is owing to the love he had for his schoolmate who looked like Clavdia. He tells Clavdia that she and the schoolboy he loved are the same ‘intimate you’ of his life. In both cases, Hans’ uses the excuse of needing a pencil to initiate interaction between the two and in both cases the pencil is lent with the instruction to remember to return it. As with many sections of the book, I was uncertain what the ultimate significance of this was. In some ways, if it is not allegorical, it seems a bit fanciful and twee to have such obvious parallels. Is it supposed to show us that Hans is emotionally immature and yearns to fulfil his homoerotic love for his schoolmate through Clavida? Or is it, in an inversion of what Hans thinks, that he only falls in love when he is ill? It wasn’t clear to me what the implications were but, whatever the case, Clavdia’s parting keepsake of her X-ray photograph is an appropriate and touching gift given Hans’ beliefs about the situation. Hans does, seemingly, sleep with Clavdia before she departs although this isn’t described in detail, in keeping with the repressed tone of the novel. It is hinted at when the X ray is described on p462 as, “All surrounded by a pale, hazy halo, the flesh - of which, against all reason, Hans Castrop had tasted on Mardi Gras”. It is also hinted at a couple of other times in even more oblique formulations (p412, p421). So, while Mann clearly doesn’t want to write about it explicitly he definitely wants the reader to know that it has taken place!
Another of the novel’s central themes is time. It appears early on in the story as a subject of reflection for Hans and he is often found cogitating on its nature, for example, “that’s a matter of motion, of motion in space, correct? Wait, hear me out! And so we measure time with space. But that is the same thing as trying to measure space with time - the way uneducated people do. It’s 20 hrs from Hamburg to Davos - true, by train. But on foot, how far is it then? And in our minds - not even a second!” (p76). Throughout the book, the passage of time is recorded in great detail but such is the similarity of the scenes, eating, rest curing, walking, that even after one day I caught myself suspecting that Hans had been there longer and that in his discombobulation he had mistakenly recorded the length of his stay. It’s really very well done as it gives a vivid illustration of how life up in the mountains differs from that ‘down below’ and slips past rapidly as Settembrini notes to Hans. Hans himself notes the elusive quality of time, “Did the 7 weeks he had demonstrably, indubitably spent with these people here feel like a mere 7 days? Or did it seem to him just the opposite, that he had lived here now much, much longer than he really had? He asked himself those same questions, both privately of himself and formally of Joachim - but could not come to any decision. Probably both were true: looking back, the time he had spent here thus far seemed unnaturally brief and at the same time unnaturally long.” (p261). This passage accurately portrays the dualistic, seemingly contradictory nature of time. The problems presented by infinity when related to human experience of time are also a subject of reflection for Hans (see quotation from p409 on p5 of this essay).
Later on, when Hans has been at the sanatorium for months if not years, Mann himself comments on the slippery nature of time telling the reader that while they are probably aware that Hans has been there for a while they would struggle to specify exactly how long. This is not for want of information, Mann says that it is possible to go back through the book and construct a chronology based on the seasons etc., it’s because of the way it has been experienced by the reader; precisely the same way humans experience time relatively rather than have an innate, objective awareness of its passage. Furthermore, there are some hints that time and life share an inextricable link and that Hans may have come up to the mountain because of his dissatisfaction with one, the other, or both, the cause is, rather, something psychological, our very sense of time itself - which, if it flows with uninterrupted regularity, threatens to elude us and which is closely related to and bound up with our sense of life that the one sense cannot be weakened without the second’s experiencing pain and injury. A great many false ideas have been spread about the nature of boredom. It is generally believed that by filling time with things new and interesting, we can make it ‘pass,’ by which we mean ‘shorten’ it; monotony and emptiness, however, are said to weigh down and hinder its passage. This is not true under all conditions. Emptiness and monotony may stretch a moment or even an hour and make it ‘boring’, but they can likewise abbreviate and dissolve large, indeed the largest units of time, until they seem nothing at all. Conversely, rich and interesting events are capable of filling time, until hours, even days, are shortened and speed past on wings; whereas on a larger scale, interest lends the passage of time breadth, solidity, and weight, so that years rich in events pass much more slowly than do paltry, bare, featherweight years that are blown before the wind and are gone” (p122). There’s also some evidence to suggest that Mann sees time as an artificial construction imposed upon the world by humanity that isn’t present in the natural world in the same way, “October began as new months are wont to do - their beginnings are perfectly modest and hushed, with no outward signs, no birthmarks. Indeed, they steal in silently and quite unnoticed, unless you are paying very strict attention. Real time knows no turning points, there are no thunderstorms or trumpet fanfares at the start of a new month or year, and even when a new century commences only we human beings fire cannon and ring bells.” (p268). On the whole, I found the book eloquent on the subject of time. Hans, as perhaps the main character through which these reflections take place, shows himself in a positive, philosophical light in these passages. However, there is some hint that Mann doesn’t approve of Hans’ philosophising on this topic, “Hans Castorp’s military cousin had been a ‘zealot’ - as a melancholic show-off once said - and that had led to a fatal outcome. Might we perhaps find some excuse for our young hero’s behaviour in assuming that such an outcome encouraged him in his disgraceful management of time, in his wicked dawdling with eternity?” (p649). I must say I found this passage hard to comprehend, does this even make sense? How do you dawdle in eternity? Everything is done and not done already! Whatever the actual meaning, it is one of the more impassioned passages that we hear from the narrator and seems to conflict with my broadly positive view of Hans’ philosophising about time.
The two characters of Settembrini and Naphta I’ll take together as a pair even though there is far more material on Settembrini and he features in the story from a far earlier stage. Once again, the feeling that these two are representative of larger themes, nations or events was inescapable. Clearly and explicitly, Settembrini symbolises liberalism and rationality as he declares himself on almost every occasion when he speaks. Against this stands Naphta, representative of religion and, perhaps, more specifically Catholicism. In an age when science and religion vied for preeminence in their ability to explain and guide life for humans, this much symbolic significance seems immediately and readily comprehensible. The two indulge in truly epic dialectics while a small audience of Hans, Joachim and a few others from the sanatorium watch and listen. While I have said that the broad strokes of the pair’s symbolism seems simple enough, the same certainly cannot be said for the minutiae of their debates. These are detailed at some length and were largely too arcane for me to understand fully. The subjects discussed ranged from morality to metaphysics to religion to economics. Many of the references were well beyond my ken but from what I could decipher Settembrini opposes his belief in rationality and the pursuit of earthly, empirical happiness against Naphta’s preference for spirituality, faith and belief in God rather than pursuit of any objective, scientific truth. The book contains page upon page of their debates and I couldn’t possibly hope to summarise their content. However, this passage may give a flavour, albeit brief, of Naphta’s attacks on rationality and intellectualism, “Saint Augustine’s statement: ‘I believe, that I may understand’ - is absolutely incontrovertible. Faith is the vehicle of understanding, the intellect is secondary. Your unbiased science is a myth. Faith, a world view, an idea - in short, the will - is always present, and it is then reason’s task to examine and prove it. In the end we always come down to ‘quod erat demonstrandum.’ The very notion of proof contains, psychologically speaking, a strong voluntaristic element.’ (p471). Even Mann seems to be aware of the overwhelming nature of the discussions between the two writing, “The two intellectual adversaries could engage in constant duels - and we could not hope to present them in their entirety without fear of likewise losing ourselves in the same desperate infinitude into which they daily threw themselves for their large audience” (p600). Despite Mann’s claim to have abridged and abbreviated, the polemics that he does reproduce are lengthy and confusing. Perhaps my feelings can best be summarised by Hans’ comment on p458 to his cousin Joachim, “I was paying attention, you see, but none of it was clear. Instead, the more they talked the more confused I got.” On the whole, I found the chapter ‘Someone Else’ to be confusing, high falutin and boring and Hans’ comments, which come at the chapter’s end, are probably the only truly easily comprehensible part!! The chapter appears to me as an intellectual version of the snowstorm whereby readers become disoriented and lost in the blizzard of point and and counterpoint. Given Hans’ reflections on these two characters after his experience in the storm, I feel it is justified to see some connection between the two. While I will write more about the storm later, it is also worth considering the ultimate fate of these two adversaries in the story. The two intellectuals eventually decide to settle their differences in a duel, which seems very out of character for both of them. However, at the crucial moment, Settembrini fires in the air and Naphta shoots himself in the head after calling Settembrini a coward. This may demonstrate some of Naphta’s religious convictions although I think I am correct in believing that suicide is also a sin within Catholicism so it is unclear to me what the Jesuit Naphta hopes to achieve by this act. To me, the more powerful message was that human differences can never be reconciled and will inevitably result in a violent and unhappy end.
From the outset, Settembrini is the more attractive of the two characters. He cuts an eccentric and endearing figure; full of intelligence and learning. He seems to bear his serious illness with stoicism and his shabby, unchanging clothing portrayed an admirable preference for learning above material goods, which I liked. He is witty and amusing in conversation with Hans and his cousin and also seems wise and humble. Hans sees him as guide and I was immediately struck by his seemingly sage advice to him to pack his bags and leave the sanatorium on the first day. He makes astute observations that amuse the cousins, mocks the sanatorium and appears to be one of the only patients capable of an independent perspective. He also corrects Hans’ philosophical errors; for example, warning against his reverence for illness and death, which seems sensible. He is also hawkish on the prospect of war from very early on, adding to the impression that he is, in some sense, prophetic. Later on in the book, things begin to seem a little less clear cut. In some senses, it seems necessary for Hans to stay at the sanatorium for a long time in order for him to have his epiphany. Viewed in this way, Settembrini’s desire for him to leave is less unequivocally positive. Indeed, my initial conception of Settembrini as a omniscient sage becomes less and less tenable as the book goes on. That said, it is Settembrini who helps Hans to accomplish his illicit skiing by helping to hide the equipment at the house he shares with Naphta so perhaps, in this indirect way, he can be seen as playing a role in Hans’ experience in the snowstorm and his subsequent return to the flat lands. Against that, it’s not altogether clear to me that Hans’ return is viewed as any better, morally or otherwise, than his time up the mountain. Intuitively, I had a slight preference for seeing him return to a more active, engaged existence with the world but if asked to support this philosophically I don’t think it would be the easiest case to make. The narrator doesn’t seem to speak definitively on the subject either. The passage that mentions Hans’ ‘wicked dawdling’ on p649 seems to be the as close as it gets to an outright condemnation of his conduct and even this passage is ambiguous. Settembrini is an explicit critic of Hans’ choice to stay up in the mountain but given his ambivalent status in the novel, it’s hard to see this as of any central importance. Naphta is a far less appealing character for me. His hardline, unswerving attitude leads him to endorse horrific historical events like the Spanish Inquisition. His militant Christianity and predilection for finery in his clothing and decoration of his house make uneasy bedfellows. He doesn’t seem to be living a very Christian life, if Jesus’ life is taken to be the exemplar, and I found him suspicious and creepy as a character. That said, he does make some valid criticisms of Settembrini and, in the final analysis, his devotion to his own Catholic ideas is no more or less valid than Settembrini’s fixation with rationalism. Equally, Settembrini’s liberalism doesn’t sit very well with his Freemasonry so both are, in some sense, flawed and alloyed characters. Settembrini also entertains ridiculous notions of the power that rationality and intellectualism hold. For instance, he tells Naphta he could cure a madman by looking into his eyes and hopes to eradicate human suffering by detailing every instance of it in an encyclopedia, which are both fanciful.
Naphta’s critique of science is especially memorable and returns to the problematic nature of time and infinity, which is a recurring theme in the book, “It was faith like any other, only worse and more obtuse than all the rest; and the word ‘science’ itself was the expression of the most stupid sort of realism, which did not blush at taking at face value the dubious reflections that objects left on the human mind and seeing them as the basis for the most dismal and vapid dogma anyone ever foisted on humanity. Was not the very idea of a world of senses that existed in and of itself the most ridiculous of all possible self-contradictions? But as a dogma, modern natural science lived exclusively and solely from the metaphysical assumption that the forms by which we recognise and organise reality - space, time, causality - reflect a real state of affairs existing independent of our knowledge. That monistic claim was the most naked piece of effrontery the Spirit had ever had to endure….The theory of infinite space and time - that was definitely based on experience, was it?...For the simple reason that in relation to infinity any given unit of mass approached zero. There was no size in infinity, and no duration or change in eternity, either. In infinite space, given that every distance is the mathematical equivalent of zero, there could be no two adjacent points, let alone a body, let alone movement.” (pp824-5)
Settembrini also appears to be a racist character as evidenced by several passages in the book. In Chapter 5, he links weakness and time wasting with being Asian, by which he mainly seems to mean Russian in this context. He has done this before when he argues that librality and reason are Western ideas that must be spread across the world. This is clearly racist although a more charitable interpretation might see him as encouraging Hans to live in accordance with his nature. He also places the mind above the body and champions reason above all (pp281-299). Within this section, when speaking about Asians and “Mongolian Muscovites” he says: “Do not model yourself on them, do not let them infect you with their ideas, but instead compare your own nature, your higher nature to theirs, and as a son of the West, of the divine West, hold sacred those things that both by nature and heritage are sacred to you. Time, for instance. This liberality, this barbaric extravagance in the use of time is the Asian style - that may be the reason why the children of the East feel so at home here.” (p289). This seems unequivocally racist to me and confirms that Settembrini sees his beloved rationality as a solely European trait. Rather more obliquely, Settembrini also seems to criticise Hans’ triste with Clavida along racial lines saying, “The gods and mortals have on occasion visited the realm of shades and found their way back. But those who reside in the nether world know that he who eats of the fruits of their realm is forever theirs” (p421). It may be possible to argue that this passage is an allegorical representation but I rather doubt this. Clavdia is presented as a patient much like all the others and so I see no need for the divisive language, which, to me, seems to guided by demarcations of race. Furthermore, his preference for mind above body seems to reach unusual, and perhaps unnatural, heights when he says, “But there is one force, one principle that is the object of my highest affirmation, my highest and ultimate respect and love, and that force, that principle, is the mind. However much I detest seeing that dubious construct of moonshine and cobwebs that goes by the name of ‘soul’ played off against the body, within the antithesis of the body and mind, it is the body that is the evil, devilish principle, because the body is nature, and nature - as an opposing force, I repeat, to mind, to reason - is evil, mystical and evil...You see, my good engineer, there you behold the mind’s great enmity toward nature, its proud mistrust of her, its greathearted insistence on the right to criticise her and her evil, irrational power.” And later on, still speaking about the body, “One must respect and defend it, when it serves the cause of emancipation and beauty, of freedom of the senses, of happiness and desire. One must despise it insofar as it is the principle of gravity and inertia opposing the flow toward the light, insofar as it represents the principle of disease and death, insofar as its quintessence is a matter of perversity, of corruption, of lust and disgrace.” (pp296-8). All of these factors combine to undermine the earlier, more positive, conception of Settembrini as a fair minded sage. After all, he seems to be a crackpot extremist obsessed with reason, which he sees as exclusive to Europeans thus placing them above all other races.
The two most striking parts of the book, for me, were the snowstorm, which appears to be an obvious centre piece and turning point for Hans where he has his epiphany-dream, and the appearance of the character Mynheer Peeperkorn at the sanatorium. Both seem to show a break with what has gone before and serve to reinvigorate Hans and shake him out of his timeless, stagnant state of torpor.
The storm is wonderfully well written and vividly realised. Amidst the total confusion and hostility of the storm the prospects of Hans’ survival look slim. However, just as Hans seems resigned to death when he falls asleep against the side of a hut up in the mountains he awakens to find the storm passed and his senses once again able to guide him. In a similar and parallel way, Hans epiphany allows him to see through the blizzard conditions of Naphta and Settembrini’s arguments and their myopic obsessions with their ways of interpreting the world. He emerges revivified and newly capable of seeing his way in the world; something he seemed totally incapable of before. The dream itself is strange and involves a sunny utopia where people are kind to one another. However, behind this loving community lies a temple where babies are sacrificed by two witches. On awakening he wonders, “Were they courteous and charming to one another, those sunny folk, out of silent regard for that horror? What a fine and gallant conclusion for them to draw! I shall hold to their side, here in my soul, and not with Naphta, or for that matter with Settembrini - they’re both windbags. The one is voluptuous and malicious, and the other is forever tooting his little horn of reason and even imagines he can stare madmen back to sanity - how preposterous, how philistine!” (p587). Here, I see Hans as emerging from his somewhat dejected period of isolation at the sanatorium and finding a new way of understanding the world. For example, with unusual certainty and a kind of new found confidence that isn’t derived from listening to someone else’s theories, “Love stands opposed to death - it alone, and not reason, is stronger than death. Only love, and not reason, is stronger than death. Only love and not reason, yields to kind thoughts…..My heart is beating strong and knows why. It beats not for purely physical reasons, the way fingernails grow on a corpse. It beats for human reasons and because my spirit is truly happy.” (p588). This appeal to love and feeling circumvents both Settembrini’s fixation with reason, which it clearly renounces, but also Naphta’s worldview with its preoccupation with religious doctrine. In spite of this seemingly rosy outcome, there remains a dark side to Hans vision. The sacrifice of babies taking place, and perhaps even underpinning the civil behaviour of the ‘sunny folk’, seems to represent an avoidable violence and cruelty in the world against which humans may choose to react with love. In the same way that Naphta and Settembrini eventually descend into a duel, albeit an unusual one, Mann seems to be pointing out that violence and death are, unavoidably, the ways of the world irrespective of how much love the human spirit can find within itself. While this recognition is depressing, it also seems undeniably true.
Mynheer Peeperkorn bursts onto the scene late in the book as Clavdia’s new lover. Strangely, Hans doesn’t seem to feel any jealousy at all towards him, which strikes me as quite improbable if we take Hans’ own professions of love to Clavdia at face value. I suppose it is possible that Clavdia was always an excuse to stay up the mountain, as I wrote about earlier, and after his experience in the snowstorm he no longer feels the need to stay up in the mountains and, therefore, no longer needs her as an excuse to do so. Another unusual aspect of Clavdia and Mynheer’s relationship, as it relates to Hans, is the fact that both solicit his partnership in ‘alliances’ for the benefit of the other. Both also make a point of saying that such alliances are usually formed against a third party rather than for them, as is the case here. Once again, I suspected that this was allegorical insofar as many countries surely formed alliances, or at the least sought them, in the run up to the First World War. However, with no easy knowledge of which nations are represented by these characters I can’t take this line of thought any further. Suffice to say it is unusual and unrealistic, to me, that Hans is so well disposed towards the lovers given his own apparent love for Clavdia. Mynheer is totally different from the other characters that Hans looks to for guidance. He makes no appeal to intellectualism, unlike Naphta and Settembrini, but is effortlessly more persuasive and magnetic than both. He is referred to as ‘a personality’ constantly in the text and brings everyone at the sanatorium under his influence by the force of this personality alone. He barely says anything, speaking in meaningless fragments but can command the entire population enticing them into late night binges and trips to the waterfalls. At his appearance, the book takes a turn for the better leaving behind the boring, confusing dialectics of Naphta and Settembrini and bringing instead highly entertaining scenes of his freewheeling and bacchanalian charm. He draws everyone’s attention, especially Hans’, with his lavish consumption and charisma. This is very well illustrated in the way that he takes the attention away from one of their neverending arguments by looking at an eagle in the sky. Settembrini criticises Hans for being swayed by popularity and aesthetics but there seems to be more to Peeperkorn, encapsulated in his exhortations to ‘feel’. However, if there is more to Peeperkorn, and my feeling is there was, it is never really quantified and is only hinted at via the huge effect he has on the people around him. This way of experiencing life, and above all feeling it, seems to be set against Settembrini’s appeal to reason and Naptha’s appeal to religion. Nonetheless, Peeperkorn ends up drinking himself to death and it was never clear to me exactly what effect he had had on Hans. Perhaps my best guess is that his character represents how important it is to be active and enjoy life, regardless of the ultimate consequences, which in this case appear to be death. Against this, he is already quite elderly when he arrives at the sanatorium so perhaps there is no greater significance to his death. In some senses he is a positive example and a breath of fresh air, both in the novel and at the sanatorium, but in another it’s hard to point to any definite philosophical positives that he embodies beyond his ability to have fun and connect with people in spite of his basic inability to say anything! He feels highly significant as a character but when I try to pin down this significance he seems to come out as a thoughtless hedonist. The only passage in which he is more coherent relates to the theme of feeling and this may signal its potential importance to understanding his role in the book, “I repeat, that it is our duty, our religious duty to feel. Our feeling, you see, is our manly vigour, which awakens life. Life slumbers. It wants to be awakened, roused to drunken nuptials with divine feeling. Because feeling, young man, is divine. Man himself is divine in that he feels. He is the very feeling of God. God created him in order to feel through him. Man is nothing more than the organ by which God consummates His marriage with awakened and intoxicated life. And if man fails to feel, it is an eruption of divine disgrace, it is the defeat of God’s manly vigour, a cosmic catastrophe, a horror that never leaves the mind” (p717).
One thing that was really brilliant and memorable was Mann’s writing of Peeperkorn’s dialogue. He is a hugely engaging ‘personality’ for the reader, just as he is for Hans and the other patients. Right from the start he is an imposing, exotic and majestic figure physically. He is also wonderfully and appropriately named for a Dutch-Indonesian spice magnate. His manner of speech is fantastic and spectacularly well written, for example, “In a rather low voice, he said, ‘Ladies and gentleman. Fine. How very fine. That set-tles it. And yet you must keep in mind and never - not for a moment - lose sight of the fact that - but enough on that topic. What is incumbent upon me to say is not so much that, but primarily and above all this: that we are duty-bound, that we are charged with an inviolable - I repeat with all due emphasis - inviolable obligation - No! No, ladies and gentlemen, not that I - oh, how very mistaken it would be to think that I - but that set-tles it, ladies and gentlemen. Settles it completely. I know we are all of one mind, and so then, to the point!” (p653). And again a little later, “‘Splendid!’ Peeperkorn cried, throwing himself against the back of his chair an stretching one arm out to the dwarf. The tone of his cry seemed to say, ‘Well, who could object to that! It’s all so wonderful!’ - ‘My child,’ he continued now in an earnest, almost stern voice, ‘that exceeds my every expectation. Emerentia - you pronounce it with modesty, but the name - and taken together with your person - in short, it reveals the loveliest possibilities. ‘Tis well worth musing upon, giving rein to all the emotions that well up in one’s chest, so that one may - but as a nickname, you must understand, my child, as a nickname - it might be Rentia, or even Emchen would cheer the heart - but for the moment I shall without hesitation hold fast to Emchen. So then, Emchen my child, listen well: a little bread, my dear. Wait! Stay! Let there be no misunderstanding. I can read from your relatively broad face that there is the danger of - bread, Renzchen, but not baked bread, of that we have a sufficiency, in all shapes and sizes. Not baked, but distilled, my angel. The bread of God, clear as crystal, my little Nickname, that we may be regaled. I am uncertain whether what I intend by using that term - I might suggest ‘a cordial for the heart’ as an alternative, if that term did not likewise run the danger of being taken in a more common, thoughtless sense - but that set-tles it, Rentia. Settles it, over and done! Or rather, in light of our duty, our holy obligation - for example, the debt of honour incumbent upon me to turn with a most cordial heart to you, so small but full of character - a gin, my love! To gladden my heart, might I say. A gin, a Schiedam gin, my Emerenzchen. Make haste to bring it to me.” (pp654-655). This whole vivacious, fragementory monologue achieves the same as ‘A gin, please’ but also so much more! His character is very well drawn even if his ultimate significance is somewhat more enigmatic.
The book ends with Hans returning to the flatlands to fight in World War I. The final scenes see him in battle, watched by the narrator. I was disappointed that there wasn’t more detail or information on what occasioned this sudden change of heart in Hans. The advent of WW1 is described as a ‘thunderbolt’ for him but we learn little or nothing of the details of his mental or psychological state around this time. The death of his cousin and his uncle, Counsol Tieppenel, who acted as his father after his parents died cannot tempt him down to the world below, in spite of his obsession with death and love of funerals, but the prospect of a bloody war can. I suppose it could be argued that war holds the promise of death on a far grander scale. This is odd and, again, seems to describe violence and war as an unavoidable and natural part of the human condition, indeed, something necessary. The fact that Settembrini and Naphta eventually descend into violence, after all their scholarly discussion, seems to have some parallel in Hans’ years of reflection finally ending in him descending to join the war. Seeing Hans on the battlefield after years of rest cures and ‘playing king’ up the mountain is both invigorating and horrible. The narrator says of the young men going into battle, “That they do it with joy, and also with boundless fear and an unutterable longing for home, is both shameful and sublime, but surely no reason to bring them here to this.” (p852). This ending seems to suggest that violence and death are in some way part of the natural order that will eventually give the foundation for fresh life and love, which is also hinted at in the dream Hans has in the snowstorm.
I found this book enigmatic and confusing. Some of it is beautifully written. For instance: Hans’ journey up into the mountain, the early parts of Settembrini’s character, the snowstorm, the discussion Hans has with Behrens about cigars (p310), certain passages reflecting on the nature of time and the character and monologues of Mynheer Peeperkorn. However, other parts are boring, long winded, arcane or all three. For example, the lengthy sections on biology in ‘Research’, the seemingly never ending, abstruse debates between Settembrini and Naphta in ‘Someone Else’ and the uncertain status of Behrens, the sanatorium and his treatments. I was often left feeling like there was some greater significance that I hadn’t grasped. In the end, I started to feel like the book just isn’t very clear about the points it wants to make and for this reason I found it difficult to enjoy as a whole. Some parts are wonderful but others are boring and soporific and by the end I felt like I hadn’t really understood why this is considered to be such a classic. It deals with weighty subjects but isn’t a philosophical treatise, it has some great characters, events and dialogues but overall isn’t an amazing story and so I ended up feeling like it is a rather confusing and unsatisfactory mixture of the two. It was an interesting and thought provoking book full of ideas and had several highly enjoyable sections but my failure to find sufficient unity in the whole left me feeling a bit disappointed with it.
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